Quod scripsi, scripsi.

With all the fuss about the “50 Shades of Grey” movie coming out this Valentine’s Day weekend, now seems like a good time to pause, take a deep breath, and remember that basically no sexual relationships, as portrayed on the big screen by Hollywood studios, resemble anything like a healthy real-life dynamic. (For that matter, most of the off-screen relationships in Tinseltown aren’t so great, either.)

So, sure. The movie, and the book before it, portray a hero who is by any sane definition abusive, and a troubled heroine who could really use some supportive friends (and better lovers) telling her to get the hell out.

But the same is probably true of your favorite rom-com. (Every year, the thing that sets my teeth most on edge during the holiday season is the number of otherwise intelligent friends who seem to like, without irony, the creepfest that is “Love Actually.”) Most Hollywood males, in romantic plots, are manipulators at the very least; most women somewhere between victims and “dating down” taken to its most extreme imbalance.

Nor is the sex itself, as portrayed on screen, anything to celebrate as an instruction in satisfying lovemaking. The clothes-tearing, blanket-mussing frenzy of dude-on-top, penis-in-vagina sex that somehow manages to never flash a breast here or a ballsack there isn’t much of a primer for how a couple of human beings can get one another off — although the 30-60ish seconds of screentime, followed by a fade to black or a cut, might not be the worst estimate of the average Hollywood-trained male’s endurance.

“I’m just not into policing what people are allowed to find arousing in their fantasy porn…I have faith in people to understand [sic] that the fictional book they are reading is just a trashy two-dimensional fantasy to get their juices flowing and not the blueprints by which to construct their actual relationships. But that’s just me.”

There are arguments to be made about how popular culture shapes social expectations (and vice versa), but those arguments are weakest when they lean on a single “bad example” document or text as a stand-in for all of culture. “50 Shades” is not going to start a sudden and heretofore nonexistent rash of bad relationships disguised as kink play. Those relationships were already out there. “50 Shades” is, if anything, a tolerable example of many extant dynamics in the proudly kinky and 50-Shades-hating community, although the men involved usually have less money and more facial hair.

Insofar as there are people who read “50 Shades” as their very first introduction to BDSM and run out looking for a guy to spank them even when they scream “no” — and those people do exist, to be sure — the solution is not less trashy porn. The solution is a better level of sexual literacy in our culture. People should have better options for learning about BDSM (and sex in general) that are as ubiquitous and easy to acquire as “50 Shades.”

Instead, go out and buy something from your friendly neighborhood sex store. Have some sex that doesn’t look like any Hollywood movie at all, if you’ve got a partner or partners to do that with. Talk about sex with your friends. Be part of a culture that celebrates education and variety of expression, rather than clamping down reflexively on anything that’s not the “right way” to have sex.

“50 Shades” is a bad book that has been made into a (presumably) bad movie. But it’s not a societal problem — or rather, it’s one small part of a societal problem that, let’s face it, most people were less vocally upset about when it came dressed in artfully rumpled bedsheets rather than leather and chain.

This is not the first time a Republican candidate has been chastised for using a musician’s work without permission; it is not even the first time a Wisconsin Republican has been chastised for using The Dropkick Murphys’ Shipping up to Boston without permission. Way back in 2012, Republican Assemblyman Jeff Fitzgerald (a close Walker ally) used it for his walk-on at the Wisconsin Republican Convention, which the Murphys described as “like a white supremacist coming out to gangsta rap.”

It happens all the time, all over America, with responses in varying degrees of legal severity from the artists: Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen have fired off cease-and-desists, Survivor sued Newt Gingrich for his use of Eye of the Tiger; Jackson Browne took John McCain to court for using Running on Empty in an attack ad (the McCain campaign eventually settled).

Beyond the surface-level absurdity of anti-labor politicians using explicitly pro-labor music in their campaigns — which is, don’t get me wrong, entertaining, and makes for a good two-second clickbait — there’s actually a lot we can unpack from this frequent and ongoing phenomenon.

The first take-away is, obviously, that any bullshit coming out of the mouths of these assholes about private property, hard earned money, and free enterprise is so much smoke up your ass. Most of us knew that already, but for the few that didn’t, yeah: these are not people who are interested in paying a fair price for the labor of others. Left-leaning politicians who are already openly skeptical about intellectual property rights might be able to spin stealing a song as a gesture of principle; the capitalist blowhards of the right, never. They’re just hypocrites. Hopefully you already knew that.

But hey, while we’re talking capitalism, let’s look at the other big takeaway here, which is an issue of supply and demand. Why is it that it’s always Republicans ripping off music from aggressively pro-labor artists?

It’s because there aren’t any popular, inspiring anthems written from a right-wing perspective.

Sure, there’s openly jingoist shit like God Bless the USA, and that works fine for whipping up the base into a frenzy of red-meat-chumming landsharks, but it doesn’t exactly speak to the human condition. Music or lyrics that really get deep down into people’s souls require a certain degree of empathy to produce, and people with significant levels of empathy don’t, as a general rule, vote Republican.

We can argue about whether the popular works by Springsteen, Survivor, the Murphys, etc. are any good, musically, but no one can deny that they have a powerful and broad-based appeal. It’s hard to find someone in a crowd that can’t get something out of those songs.

People who are just in it for themselves — who think everyone should start life with a handgun and a kick in the ass and be told to go out there and get theirs, and fuck anyone who gets in the way, which is pretty much the Republican party platform these days — can’t write those songs. You have to think about the lives of other human beings to touch the lives of other human beings.

We’re never going to see the great Republican Bruce Springsteen because a Republican can’t write Bruce Springsteen’s songs. The closest thing the dedicated right wing has is Ted Nugent, and that’s probably enough said for all of us.

The State of the Union address and the minority party’s response(s) are the apex of made-for-TV politics, and that’s not a compliment.

I avoid them most years, but the replies have been getting increasingly hilarious as the Republican party devolves further and further into leaderless anarchy. Witness this year’s five “response to the State of the Union address” speeches: an official Republican Party address by freshman Senator Joni Ernst, a Spanish-language address ostensibly following the same outline as Ernst’s (more on that in a moment) by freshman Representative Carlos Curbelo, a “Tea Party response” by Representative Curt Clawson, and personal, unsponsored reply speeches by Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

One could safely expect the non-party-sponsored speeches to be off-message, and to greater or lesser degrees they were, but in theory Ernst and Curbelo were giving the same official GOP response (which tells you a bit about how pre-scripted these things are, and how little flexibility they have to respond to what actually comes out of the President’s mouth).

On most of the particulars, the message was the same, with the same not-particularly-relevant talking points delivered in the same order. But on immigration reform, Ernst’s English-language speech was silent — she never used the word “immigration” at all — while Curbelo’s Spanish-language speech called for Congress to

Not exactly radical stuff, but the discrepancy is telling. Two GOP freshmen deliver ostensibly the same message in two different languages; in the Spanish-language version the GOP is suddenly the party of “permanent solutions for our immigration system,” while in the English-language version it doesn’t come up at all.

Pandering to different constituencies with contradictory messages and hoping no one notices is nothing new in politics — but it’s usually at least done with different speeches, rather than with differing translations of the same, party-approved message.

Remember the good old days, back in late 2014 or so, when a tagline like “the media isn’t telling you…” guaranteed a news story about chemtrails, fluoridation, or possibly fluoridating chemtrails?

Apparently those days are over, and the hot new clickbait for 2015 is “The World Doesn’t Care,” “The Media Isn’t Covering It,” and similar phrasings previously left to the deepest of deep-end fishers:

The problem being that, unlike chemtrails, these stories are being covered, often in depth and generally by the handful of major news outlets that still wield a budget capable of sending an experienced reporter or photographer to somewhere like Nigeria on short notice. (Websites like Mic.com, The Daily Dot, and Buzzfeed, being notoriously short on professional staff, have to rely on someone else to get the story before they can report that no one’s covering the story.)

If you wanted to read about, say, the all-out ground war currently going on in Nigeria, all you had to do in the last week or so was pick up a newspaper. It’s been on front page of pretty much every major daily, and it’s been covered inside in substantial articles. Ditto the NAACP bombing, which, again, the world had apparently not heard of until The Daily Dot got the story:

(For what it’s worth, they cite the Los Angeles Times‘s coverage of the attack in the first paragraph of their story on the lack of mainstream media attention.)

This isn’t reporting. This isn’t even reporting on reporting, which, navel-gazing as it can be, is occasionally a valid and useful sort of journalism. This is marketing, thought up by the marketing team and focus-group tested to see if people closer to the center of the political spectrum would still fall for the Glenn Beck pitch that you, and only you, valued customer reader, can see past the flim-flam and lies to know the real truth. You special snowflake you.

Those stories, and many other stories, are already out there. If you’re not seeing them until they pop up on your Facebook feed with an alarming headline, it’s not because of a media coverup — it’s because you’re getting your news from your Facebook feed.

Shameful, shameful: As serious and reliable news outlets like The New York Daily News are reporting today, the United States failed to send any major representatives to join in a Paris march honoring the slain journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo yesterday.

In doing so, our feckless, wimpy, mom-jeans-wearing President missed an opportunity to show solidarity with other defenders of the free press like Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Prince Abdullah Ben Hamad al-Khalifa of Bahrain.

All told, the United States failed to join with representatives of nations that have, collectively, 34 journalists currently imprisoned (to say nothing of those beaten, murdered, stolen from, censored, and otherwise oppressed) in a moving display honoring the right to free expression and a free press.

Thankfully, America’s own unfettered tabloid rags have the story, and they want you to know: we let the world down by refusing to show our solidarity with the oppressors of thousands of journalists who also presumably suis Charlie, but not right now, because that would be inconvenient.

I know, I know, aging Millennial bitching about not being the cool young kid anymore. But I went back and watched The Fifth Element the other night (for those of you that weren’t around back then, it was a 1997 cheesy sci-fi blockbuster, and let me just say how terrifying it is to me that you’re old enough to read and understand these words), and man was it good.

Not like, A Good Movie good. The Fifth Element will never be A Good Movie. But it was a good movie, you know? And it had everything that you don’t see on-screen in blockbusters now.

Seriously. In no particular order: female orgasm (via tactfully offscreen cunnilingus). Realistically bad cops and military — not Dr. Strangelove caricatures; just a bunch of blunt instruments who only know how to do one thing, and keep doing it over and over again regardless of whether it’s what the situation calls for or not. More people of color than I’ve seen in a movie not specifically about minority culture or history for literally decades now, doing everything from being the President to being baggage handlers (just like in, you know, the real world, but not the world we see in movies most of the time).

That fantastic “Sleeping Beauty” moment where Bruce Willis kisses the sleeping Milla Jovovich, who wakes up, puts a gun to his head, and tells him “never without my permission.” We believe his abject apology, too — he feels sincere when he says “You’re right, you’re right. I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have done that. It was wrong to kiss you.” And not just because of the gun, although it’s pretty awesome that she doesn’t put it down or appear particularly forgiving even after he apologizes.

And don’t let’s forget Chris Tucker’s character Ruby Rhod, who was basically the walking definition of genderqueer: we don’t know what they’re identifying or presenting as; they’re just doing their thing and being sexy. Sometimes in a dress! Sometimes not! The clothes aren’t the point or the problem. It’s awesome.

That’s not to say it’s a perfect movie, either in terms of cinematography or representation. It’s a classic Bechdel test failure, with a classic Strong Female Protagonist (TM), who we’re told is a godlike alien “perfect being” but who needs a couple of old white men to plan her every move in saving the universe. She barely even speaks, has trouble walking for half the film, and needs Bruce Willis to come save her from a guy with a gun despite having martial arts directly programmed into her brain (this two years before Keanu Reeves knew kung fu in The Matrix, mind you). And yes, the perfect being decides to manifest itself as a young, skinny white woman, despite coming from what appears to be a race of intergalactic steampunk hedgehogs.

But it’s still a blockbuster that wasn’t just ahead of its time in the racial and sexual diversity of the world we see on-screen. It’s ahead of our time, now, seventeen years later, and that’s a thought so depressing it might just take another underrated 90s classic to cure. Cookie’s Fortune, anyone?

Twitter and Tumblr have been full of self-righteous commuter nannies for years, but according to BuzzFeed, a New York MTA spokesperson is now promising an official campaign against that perennial transit scourge: people who take up too much space on the train or bus.

Pause to think about that one for a moment. Overcrowding on public transit is clearly a problem, at least on some lines and at some hours of the day. Faced with that problem, the MTA is spending taxpayer money…to chastise taxpayers about how they’re sitting.

Not to run more busses, or build more train lines, or improve the seats themselves, mind you. To tell you, the commuter, how you’re Doing It Wrong.

If you’re lauding this as a good thing, congratulations: you’re blaming individuals for an institutional failing! The name of the game is Divide and Conquer, and you’re losing.

Are there assholes who take up space they don’t need to on public transit? Sure. (There are also very large people, people with bad joints, homeless people who carry all the property they own in this world wherever they go, and lots of other people who can’t help taking up space.)

Would a campaign to get the assholes to scrunch in a bit make a measurable difference in rush hour overcrowding, even if it achieved 100% Asshole Penetration? No. (Although if Asshole Penetration is a thing you’re into I can recommend some good stores.)

And would any of that matter if cities ran enough public transit to actually meet public demand, with — dare we say it — spare seats built into even peak hour estimates? Again, no.

The reality is that on any given bus or train car, you might be losing — upper end estimate here — as many as three or four viable seats to jerks taking up more space than they need to. That sucks, but changing it will not make crowded cars less crowded. Occasional, individual space-wasters are not the root cause of overcrowded busses and trains.

The problem is an underfunded infrastructure that can’t possibly meet demand, and that has been built from the ground up to prioritize personal cars over mass transportation. You could lock every public transit commuter’s body into a precisely measured sheath for the ride, and it still wouldn’t turn “not enough busses” into “enough busses.”

It’s no surprise that the MTA wants a campaign against leg-spreaders and backpacks, because that actively encourages you, the taxpayer, to be pissed at someone that isn’t the MTA. But you’re a sucker if you fall for it, and you’re a sucker who’s choosing to blame someone who can’t solve the problem instead of someone who can.

Solving it costs money, of course. Self-righteousness, as always, is free.